Tag Archives: Asia-Pacific War

“Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has visited
the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, where he offered ‘sincere and
everlasting condolences’ to the victims of Japan’s attack on the base 75
years ago. ‘We must never repeat the horrors of war again, this is the solemn vow the people of Japan have taken,’ he said.”

“In
the early 20th century, the official history holds, Japan forcibly took
innocent girls from Korea and elsewhere to its military-run brothels.
There, they were held as sex slaves and defiled by dozens of soldiers a
day in the most hateful legacy of Japan’s 35-year colonial rule, which
ended with its defeat in World War II.

As she researched her book, combing through a rich archive in South Korea
and Japan and interviewing surviving comfort women, Ms. Park, 58, said
she came to realize that such a sanitized, uniform image of Korean
comfort women did not fully explain who they were and only deepened this
most emotional of the many disputes between South Korea and Japan.

In trying to give what she calls a more comprehensive view of the
women’s lives, she made claims that some found refreshing but many
considered outrageous and, in some cases, traitorous.“

“A Chinese campaign to have documents related to Japan’s use of
wartime sex slaves and its bloody invasion of Nanjing recognised by
Unesco has sparked a new round of diplomatic tension between Beijing and
Tokyo. A Unesco panel in Abu Dhabi will announce on Friday successful nominations for inclusion in the UN body’s Memory of the World programme, amid efforts by Japanese officials to block the bid.”

“Using the carefully chosen words that govern reckonings with Japan’s militarist past, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reiterated his country’s official remorse for the catastrophe of World War II on Friday, the eve of the 70th anniversary of the war’s end.In
a nationally televised address, Mr. Abe described feelings of ‘profound
grief’ and offered ‘eternal, sincere condolences’ for the dead. He said
Japan had inflicted ‘immeasurable damage and suffering’ when it ‘took
the wrong course and advanced along the road to war.’

But
in a potentially contentious break with previous expressions of
contrition by Japanese leaders, he did not offer a new apology of his
own.”

“’After the war ended, I came back and saw the destruction and the place
where my sister was killed,’ Mr. Lee said in an interview. ‘That street
had houses on both sides. Originally there were two-story buildings, but
they were completely gone.’“

“President Park Geun-hye of South Korea urged Japan on Sunday to have the ‘courage and honesty’ to admit to its historical wrongdoings against Koreans and other Asians, including its enslavement
of Korean women in military brothels during World War II.

'As
Germany and France overcame conflict and mutual enmity and became
leaders in building a new Europe, it is time for South Korea and Japan
to write a new history together,’ Ms. Park said in a nationally
televised speech. But despite their geographical proximity, the two
nations could not get close in heart because of tensions surrounding
historical issues.’

Ms.
Park delivered her speech to mark the 96th anniversary of the March 1,
1919, uprising against Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from
1910 until Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945.”

"Japan’s foreign ministry requested that McGraw-Hill delete a passage containing a reference to comfort women from a text on world history used by high schools in California. The passage says that Japan’s imperial army ‘forcibly recruited, conscripted and dragooned as many as 200,000 women aged 14 to 20’ to serve in military brothels.

But at a meeting with officials from the Japanese consulate in New York, McGraw-Hill refused to change the passage, saying it was ‘based on historical facts,’ according to the Sankei Shimbun.

Watanabe welcomed McGraw-Hill’s refusal to bow to pressure, but said Japanese children risked growing up ignorant of their country’s past.

Censoring textbooks would be devastating for pupils, she said. ‘Children in neighbouring countries know the truth about the Japanese military’s conduct in Asia … only Japanese children would be kept in the dark, but they have the right to learn the facts of history.’”